[GNC] Setting up a new accounting scheme in GnuCash

[David Cousens]

Frank
As christopher and Adrien have commented, GnuCash is forgiving in that if
you have assigned an account to a specific type, you can easily change the
type of an account and the account types are used for specific
functionality, not just in GnuCash but in accounting in general. The
Netherlands has adopted the
IFRS international accounting standards as the basis of its accountingsystem
as has the EU generally so the basic account types are the same.

There is one proviso on changing the type of a specific account by editing
the account type in the dialog . If you have existing transactions which
have been created assuming the account was of one specific type, for example
an Asset account, changing the account type to Liability for example will
not change those existing transactions so that they are correct for the new
account type. The transactions might have to be corrected manually by
editing and in the case described changing debit entries of the account you
have changed to credit entries and vice versa.

There is a relationship between the account type and the way debits and
credits affect the balance of each type of account. This is fundamental to
the way double entry accounting works and it will be helpful to assign the
type of account correctly before you start entering transactions. Before
that you can change them at will.

The Introductory section of the current version  GnuCash Tuorial and
Concepts guide (https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v3/C/gnucash-guide/index.html)
explains this relationship if you are not already familiar with it. That is
for an English version of the guide as I could not find a link to a Dutch
translation of the current version of the guide. Wikipedia's sections on
double entry accounting also  had a fairly good explanation of this.

David Cousens



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David Cousens
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